Uber: Judge Says He May Grant Waymo's Request For An Injunction Against Uber's Self Driving Efforts

I was going to put something together on Anthony Levandowski's use of
the 5th amendment in a civil matter and some of the implications of
doing so but didn't get to it. In the meantime here is a look at some
high-buck lawyering and tactics of litigators...

I was thinking more along the lines of inferring guilt--in a criminal proceeding an inference from the assertion of the 5th amendment right is strictly verboten and judges so instruct the jury, whereas in most state courts (California being a notable exception) and U.S. federal court, a civil pleading of the 5th may be assumed to be an admission of guilt.

But yeah, another implication is: if you piss off a tech savvy* federal judge you've got a problem.

The U.S.
judge overseeing a blockbuster case over self-driving car technology
suggested Uber could face an injunction if a key Uber executive does not
testify for fear of exposing himself to criminal prosecution, according
to a transcript seen by Reuters.Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O),
sued ride services company Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] last month,
alleging that a former Waymo executive, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded
over 14,000 confidential documents before leaving the company to
subsequently join Uber. Waymo said Uber benefited from those documents.

Levandowski
is not a defendant in the case, but he is a central figure in the
high-profile litigation that pits two Silicon Valley technology giants
against each other, both of which are vying to dominate in the
competitive autonomous vehicles sector.

Waymo
is seeking a preliminary injunction from the court, which would
temporarily stop Uber from using any of the allegedly stolen
intellectual property. A hearing is scheduled for May 3.Uber,
which has said the allegations are baseless but has not yet responded
to Waymo's complaint in court, has argued that the trade secrets issue
should be sent to arbitration.

"You
represent somebody who's in a mess," U.S. District Court Judge William
Alsup in San Francisco told the attorney for Levandowski, Miles Ehrlich,
during a closed court hearing on Wednesday. Reuters saw the transcript
of that hearing.

Ehrlich
had told the court that based on the "potential for criminal action"
against Levandowski, the engineer would be asserting his Fifth Amendment
rights against self-incrimination....MORE

Judge William Alsup certainly continues to make himself known for how he
handles technology-intensive cases. In techie circles, he's mostly
known for presiding over the Oracle/Google Java API copyright case, and
the fact that he claimed to have learned to program in Java to better understand the issues in the case (in which he originally ruled, correctly,
that APIs were not subject to copyright protection, only to be
overturned by an appeals court that simply couldn't understand the
difference between an API and functional code)....